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Brooks is right to note that not all of the objections to freer migration are economic; he mentions a few examples like cultural integration and concerns about crime and so on. But he’s also right to point out that these non-economic objections don’t really hold up any better than the economic ones. Affirming his point about immigrants and crime, for instance, here’s Jason Pargin:

Donald Trump famously began his campaign by implying most Mexican immigrants are rapists and consistently stood by those comments when offered a chance to retract or clarify them. According to all of the data available, this is simply not true. Immigrants — regardless of how they entered the country — do not commit more crimes, violent or otherwise. Neighborhoods with high immigrant populations do not have higher crime rates.

And The Economist adds:

If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it. Granted, some immigrants commit crimes, or even headline-grabbing acts of terrorism. But in America the foreign-born are only a fifth as likely to be incarcerated as the native-born.

This makes sense; considering how much of an improvement in quality of life it is for most immigrants to move to the US, they have good reason to be on their best behavior and not want to blow their opportunity. But what about those who are actively hostile to the US, like would-be terrorists? Well, it’s true that someone who genuinely wanted to commit an act of terrorism against the US would be a legitimate danger, obviously (assuming they weren’t already known to American authorities and wouldn’t just be arrested as soon as they came here); but even so, it’s unclear how giving them the option to become a permanent resident would make this threat significantly worse. After all, if all they wanted was to blow up a building or drive a truck into a crowd of people, there’s no reason why they couldn’t just visit the US as a tourist and do it then; there wouldn’t be any need for them to go to all the trouble of changing to a permanent US address and putting down roots first.

So then aside from the crime question, what about the vast majority of would-be immigrants who are peaceful and would want to put down roots? How do we deal with the more general challenge of smoothly integrating them into our society despite all the differences in language and culture and so on? Sure, maybe it’s not as much of an issue when we’re only bringing in a few immigrants at a time, but if we accept a large number of them all at once, won’t those disparities in language and culture just be too great to overcome at some point?

Well, let’s think about how hypothetical this question actually is. If it were really true that things like language and culture were insurmountable obstacles to integrating people into a new society, then we might predict that, say, taking half of Mexico and converting it into US territory overnight would be completely impossible. The thing is, though, the US actually did annex half of Mexico in the mid-19th century, and it came out the other side just fine, despite that territory still being “Mexican” in terms of language and culture, and in fact still largely remaining so to this day, as Stratfor describes:

A substantial portion of the United States, running from California to Texas, was conquered territory, taken from Mexico in the first half of the 19th century. [This means that] the U.S.-Mexican border is in some fundamental ways arbitrary. The line of demarcation defines political and military relationships, but does not define economic or cultural relationships. The borderlands — and they run hundreds of miles deep into the United States at some points — have extremely close cultural and economic links with Mexico.

[…]

Mexico simply does not end at the Mexican border, and it hasn’t since the United States defeated Mexico.

What’s more, the US takeover of this territory wasn’t even a voluntary annexation, and its inhabitants weren’t given the choice of whether to remain Mexicans or become Americans; the choice was made for them only after a long and bloody war. In contrast, the people who immigrate here today actually want to be here and want to make it work. Does it really seem that impossible, then, that they should be able to fit into American society well enough to keep a job and get along with their neighbors? (Especially considering the fact that, despite all the fuss about Mexican culture supposedly being dramatically different from American culture, the two aren’t actually that different. Is the argument against Mexican immigration supposed to be that a population that’s stereotypically into things like driving pickup trucks, drinking beer, going to church, cooking out, and watching football will be completely unable to coexist with a population that’s stereotypically into things like driving pickup trucks, drinking beer, going to church, cooking out, and watching fútbol?) The success of cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio and Albuquerque and countless others would seem to indicate otherwise. Maybe this whole issue of cultural compatibility isn’t actually that big a deal after all?

All right, fine, maybe it’s not such a big deal in that one particular example. But not everyone who migrates to the US is coming from Mexico; there are a lot of migrants who come over from cultures that really are quite different from ours. So what about those cases? What if we’re talking about, like, super-hardcore Islamists from the Middle East who don’t want to be congenial with anyone who doesn’t adhere to strict Islamic customs or something? Well, okay, it’s true that such people do exist – and occasionally, they even come to the US. But even if we momentarily set aside the moral argument that merely having extreme beliefs doesn’t mean they aren’t still entitled to basic human rights and the opportunity for a good life (as illustrated by the fact that the US has plenty of native-born citizens with all kinds of extreme beliefs, and we don’t tell them they can’t live here anymore simply because of those beliefs), what’s also true is that the overlap between the people whose beliefs could accurately be described as “super-hardcore Islamist” (as opposed to the much larger majority of Muslims who are more moderate) and those who would actually move to the US if given the chance (as opposed to moving to Saudi Arabia or some other country more amenable to their lifestyle) is pretty small, to say the least. The more deeply someone is attached to a way of life that might be considered “incompatible with American culture” (whatever that means), the less likely it is that they’ll be particularly interested in coming here to begin with – especially not when there are more suitable options closer to them where they could just as easily go instead. If anything, the Muslims wanting to come to the US would much more likely be those trying to get away from the horrors of radical Islamist ideology. But in any case, the sizeable majority of them actually wouldn’t fit into either category, because they wouldn’t have any interest in emigrating in the first place. As it turns out, most people, if you ask them whether they’d want to permanently move to another country, will tell you they’d prefer not to move anywhere at all. Here’s The Economist again:

If borders were open, how many people would up sticks? Gallup, a pollster, estimated in 2013 that 630m people—about 13% of the world’s population—would migrate permanently if they could, and even more would move temporarily. Some 138m would settle in the United States, 42m in Britain and 29m in Saudi Arabia.

[Among Middle Easterners, only about 1% said that they’d both want to move to another country and that the US would be their first choice.]

Gallup’s numbers could be an overestimate. People do not always do what they say they will. Leaving one’s homeland requires courage and resilience. Migrants must wave goodbye to familiar people, familiar customs and grandma’s cooking. Many people would rather not make that sacrifice, even for the prospect of large material rewards.

Wages are twice as high in Germany as in Greece, and under European Union rules Greeks are free to move to Germany, but only 150,000 have done so since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2010, out of a population of 11m. The weather is awful in Frankfurt, and hardly anyone speaks Greek. Even very large disparities combined with open borders do not necessarily lead to a mass exodus. Since 1986 the citizens of Micronesia have been allowed to live and work without a visa in the United States, where income per person is roughly 20 times higher. Yet two-thirds remain in Micronesia.

These findings might seem surprising. Are people really so attached to their places of residence that a global “open borders” policy would basically result in 90% of people just staying put? Again though, this question isn’t actually as hypothetical as it sounds. In fact, for most of world history, it’s been pretty much the norm, as Nathan Smith points out:

The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I.

And commenter DoctorAntaeus adds:

“Open borders” is what essentially created the US, which didn’t have a single federal immigration law until 1882 and no effective limits on non-Asians until well into the 20th century.

(Regarding that last point, when federal immigration restrictions were finally imposed, they first came in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But if this act – and the others like it that eventually followed after World War I – actually produced even the slightest benefit for the US, I don’t know of any evidence for it.)

So then what might it look like if we went back to the old approach and started loosening some of these restrictions? Or to go even further with it and imagine the most extreme scenario, what might it look like if we just completely threw open the gates and allowed everyone to migrate to the US who wanted to – all 138m of them? If we added this number to the current immigrant population of 45m (out of a total US population of 335m), we’d end up with a total immigrant population of 183m out of a total population of 473m; so in other words, the immigrant population would increase from about 13% to about 39%. Would such a thing even be possible, much less realistic? Well, based on the examples of other countries, it’s not actually as far-fetched as it might seem. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland all have populations that are about 30% foreign-born; Singapore’s population is 43% foreign-born; and there are a few rich Gulf states like Qatar and the UAE that are actually majority foreign-born (77% in Qatar’s case, and 88% in the UAE’s). If we include small countries as well as large ones, then altogether about 1/6 of the world’s countries have populations that are 1/3 foreign-born or more – and their native-born populations certainly don’t seem any poorer for it. (Also, for what it’s worth, California’s population is currently 27% foreign-born, and the populations of New York, New Jersey, and Florida are all over 20% foreign-born as well.)

But of course, we’re just imagining the most extreme scenario here, in which we let in everybody all at once. In reality, the process of loosening up our immigration restrictions would certainly be much more gradual and incremental; we’d most likely start by just letting in a few percent more immigrants per year, and then if that seemed to be going well, we could let in a few percent more, and so on. If we were really worried about the risk of disrupting the system with a big sudden change, we wouldn’t have to run that risk at all if we didn’t want to.

Even so, some might argue that regardless of whether it was done quickly or slowly, the very act of bringing such a massive number of new people under US jurisdiction would simply overwhelm the system in the end; our social services just wouldn’t be capable of supporting so many new people being added to its rolls. As you might expect, I don’t personally give much credence to this argument, for reasons we’ve already discussed; when you add a bunch of new immigrants to the population, it’s functionally the same thing as having a bunch of new babies who eventually grow up and join the workforce – and we’ve had that kind of population growth over our entire history as a country without issue. At no point has the growing population ever been such a problem that we’ve had to scrap essential social services because there were “too many people;” the tax base has simply grown as the population has grown, and so our ability to provide these services has kept pace with the demand for them.

But even if you don’t accept this explanation, that’s no reason to abandon the whole idea of increasing immigration altogether – because after all, there’s still a whole range of intermediate options between shutting everyone out and making everyone full citizens. For instance, if we’re worried about social services becoming overextended, we could always just allow migrants to come into the US but make them ineligible to receive government benefits (at least at first). This wouldn’t be my first choice of policy, mind you, just because of how inherently unfair and discriminatory it would be; but nevertheless, as Caplan notes, it would still be better than our current approach of just not letting people freely migrate here in the first place:

‘[A] popular complaint is that mass immigration is a massive burden on taxpayers.  Milton Friedman himself famous declared, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”  The social science, however, tells a different story: The average immigrant pays about as much in taxes as he uses in benefits.

If this seems hard to believe, consider two things. First, other countries have already paid for adult immigrants’ education, so we don’t have to.  Second, a lot of government services – most obviously defense and debt service – can be consumed by a larger population for no extra charge.  Still worried?  There’s a cheaper and more humane remedy than keeping foreigners out: Make them eligible to work but not collect benefits.

And The Economist elaborates further:

There are certainly risks if borders are opened suddenly and without the right policies to help absorb the inflow. But nearly all these risks could be mitigated, and many of the most common objections overcome, with a bit of creative thinking.

If the worry is that immigrants will outvote the locals and impose an uncongenial government on them, one solution would be not to let immigrants vote—for five years, ten years or even a lifetime. This may seem harsh, but it is far kinder than not letting them in. If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.

This sounds horribly discriminatory, and it is. But it is better for the migrants than the status quo, in which they are excluded from rich-world labour markets unless they pay tens of thousands of dollars to people-smugglers—and even then they must work in the shadows and are subject to sudden deportation. Today, millions of migrants work in the Gulf, where they have no political rights at all. Despite this, they keep coming. No one is forcing them to.

Again, in an ideal world, I don’t think we’d feel it necessary to impose these kinds of restrictions on immigrants at all. But even if you disagree on that point, it seems clear that it’s entirely possible to allow for freer migration than we have now, in a way that benefits both the migrants themselves and the countries receiving them.

Of course, there’s still one other party involved in the whole migration process that we haven’t really paid much attention to yet, but which shouldn’t be left out of the discussion – namely, the countries that migrants leave behind when they move away. We’ve established that the countries that receive new migrants are made better off by the economic contributions that the migrants bring to the table – but does that mean that the migrants’ old countries are therefore made worse off by losing them? Luckily, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as William MacAskill explains:

You might have some concerns about this idea [of free migration]. Won’t mass immigration be politically disruptive? Won’t it cause a “brain drain,” resulting in all the best talent from poor countries leaving, making those left behind worse off than before?

[…]

There are good responses to each of these worries. […] Regarding political disruption, it would improve politics in poor countries: dictators and corrupt governments would have far less power over their people, because those people would have a much easier opportunity to leave the country. For the rich countries, the evidence is ambiguous. For example, most social scientists detect little effect of immigration on the size of government, even though immigrants are more in favor of the welfare state: there is a delay before they are eligible to vote, and even when they do have the vote, their turnout at elections is very low.

Regarding the “brain drain,” immigration from poor countries to rich countries would significantly benefit those who choose to remain in the poorer country. Immigrants send substantial remittances back to their home countries—where total global remittances are several times larger than total foreign-aid spending and can be as much as a third of a poor country’s GDP. A larger diaspora increases trade between the home country and the country to which immigrants move. Immigrants often return to their home countries, and when they do, they bring back valuable skills. Puerto Rico provides a good illustration of this. More than half of Puerto Ricans live abroad, but the very fact that Puerto Ricans have been able to emigrate to the United States means that the standard of living of those who still live in Puerto Rico has increased sixfold since 1980, and is now comparable to countries like the United Kingdom and Italy.

This is yet another great example of free exchange creating win-win situations in which everybody is made better off. Having said that, though, it’s important to make the point that even if migrants moving from poorer countries to richer ones did leave the poorer countries worse off, that wouldn’t therefore give those poor countries the right to keep their people confined within their borders like prisoners (a la North Korea). People should have the freedom to move if they want to, simply as a basic human right.

And that brings us to the most important reason of all for allowing freer migration: the moral one. Sure, it’s great that immigration benefits us economically; obviously, if I didn’t think that mattered, I wouldn’t have spent all this time discussing it. But the biggest reason why freedom of migration is important is the same reason why free trade is important – namely, that the lives and well-being of people in poor countries matter just as much as the lives and well-being of people in rich countries, and so there’s no moral reason why they shouldn’t have access to the same opportunities as richer people. To willingly cut them off from the chance at a decent life, just because they had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of some arbitrary line through no fault of their own, is inhumane.

As things currently stand, such arbitrary lines – which we call borders – essentially function as “luck dams” (to borrow Aaron Rabinowitz’s term), holding all the good fortune on one side and preventing it from being shared by anyone else (even though, ironically, allowing it to flow freely between the two sides would actually increase its quantity for both sides at once). Michael Sandel illustrates the situation in microcosm:

Laredo, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, are two adjacent towns separated by the Rio Grande. A child born in Laredo is eligible for all of the social and economic benefits of the American welfare state, and has the right to seek employment anywhere in the United States when she comes of age. A child born on the other side of the river is entitled to none of these things. Nor does she have the right to cross the river. Through no doing of their own, the two children will have very different life prospects, simply by virtue of their place of birth.

This scenario – people living on one side of a river having access to all kinds of wonderful amenities, and people on the other side of the river not having any of them, simply by virtue of being born on the wrong side of the river – is the kind of thing you might read about in a cliché science fiction story or parable, intended to serve as an allegory for social injustice and inequality, but presented in such a heavy-handed manner that it makes you roll your eyes at how on-the-nose it is. The thing is, though, this is what’s actually happening in real life – and yet we just accept it as the way things have to be. Even those who claim to care about poverty and inequality most – progressive activists and scholars and so on – often only focus on the disparities that exist within the borders of their own country, not the even greater disparities that exist outside those borders. But as Kenneth Rogoff asks:

Wouldn’t a true progressive support equal opportunity for all people on the planet, rather than just for those of us lucky enough to have been born and raised in rich countries?

This question becomes even more compelling when we consider the fact that “supporting equal opportunity for all people on the planet” wouldn’t even directly demand anything of us, like volunteering a bunch of our time or spending a bunch of extra money. All it would require of us is that we simply back off and leave people alone to freely transact with each other if they want to, rather than actively intervening to stop them from doing so. In our current system, we go out of our way to interfere with people’s pursuit of a better life, by stopping them from engaging in transactions that would be beneficial for both sides. All a pro-migration policy would require is that we just… stop doing that. Caplan sums up his take on the matter:

My position: The world’s nations – including of course the United States – should abolish their immigration laws.  Anyone willing to pay for transportation should be able to travel here legally, anyone willing to pay for housing should be able to live here legally, and anyone who finds a willing employer should be able to work here legally.

[…]

Why should we grant foreigners the rights to travel, live, and work where they want?  The same reason we should grant these rights to women, blacks, and Jews: They’re human beings and they count.  Is this asking too much?  No. I’m not proposing that we give foreigners homes or jobs.  I’m proposing that we allow foreigners to earn these worldly goods from willing native landlords and employers.  Under current law, housing and employment discrimination against foreigners isn’t just legal; it’s mandatory.  Why? Because the foreigners chose the wrong parents.  How horrible is that?

He continues:

Immigration restrictions are unjust.  Letting people work for willing employers and rent from willing landlords is not charity.  It’s basic decency.  And even though foreigners wickedly chose the wrong parents, they’re clearly people.

[…]

Imagine the U.S. made it illegal for blacks, women, or Jews to take certain jobs or live in certain neighborhoods.  You wouldn’t merely object.  You’d be appalled.  Whatever your specific moral views, you know it’s wrong to prohibit a black, woman, or Jew from accepting a job or renting a home.

My question: How is mandatory discrimination against foreigners against less wrong than mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews?  The leading rationale is that “we should take care of our own first.”  That might be a good argument against sending foreigners welfare checks.  But it’s an Orwellian argument for stopping immigrants from working or renting here.  Minding your own business when two strangers trade with each other is not a form of charity.

This is not a weird libertarian point.  The fact that I never put Krazy Glue in the locks of the Center for Immigration Studies does not make me one of its donors.

Friends of immigration restrictions often compare nations to families.  I’ll accept their analogy.  I love my children more than I love the rest of you put together.  This is a good reason to worry that I’ll treat you unjustly if there’s ever a conflict of interest.  But it’s no excuse for me to treat you unjustly.  “I want my beloved son to get this job” does not justify slashing rival candidates’ tires the morning of the final interview.  The same goes for immigration policy.  Your love for Americans may tempt you to treat foreigners unjustly, but it’s no excuse for treating them unjustly.

[…]

Why must I be so radical?  In part, because this is a matter of basic human rights.  We don’t have to give foreigners welfare or let them vote.  But treating fellow human beings like criminals for working without government permission is unconscionable.

Caplan concludes his argument by calling our current system a kind of global apartheid – which might sound overly dramatic, but I actually don’t think is an exaggeration at all, because that’s exactly what our current system is, and in fact is specifically intended to be. The whole function of national borders as they currently exist is to keep populations segregated from each other – to keep the benefits enjoyed by some from being available to all. The implicit rationale behind this seems to be that different populations aren’t just distinct from each other in terms of language and geography, but are somehow morally distinct, and that those inside one’s own borders should be given greater moral status than those outside them. But like I said earlier, applying this logic to national borders makes no more sense morally than someone within the US applying it to state borders, like a person from Texas or New York believing that everyone in their state is entitled to a decent life but no one from any other state is.

In an ideal utopian future, I wouldn’t expect us to do away with national borders entirely; they’d still exist, just like the borders between US states still exist. But like the borders between US states, they wouldn’t serve as barriers to free movement; they would simply be handy tools for delineating different jurisdictions. “Nations,” in other words, would be regarded as nothing more than administrative units, not as morally distinct entities whose citizens deserved to be treated differently. They would just be convenient ways of marking out which geographical areas their elected leaders were responsible for providing public services within, and that would be all.

Needless to say, though, this imagined future is still a long way off. In the meantime, unfortunately, Brennan’s line from before about how “the restriction introduced by mostly closed borders on labor mobility is the single most inefficient thing governments do” remains true. However good the intentions behind them might be (to protect the jobs of US workers and so forth), they’re in fact little more than another demonstration of the thing we’ve seen over and over again throughout this post, which is just how much power the government has to make things worse when it tries to unduly interfere with people’s freely-made choices.

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